Antony’s Ring: Remediating Ancient Rhetoric on the Elizabethan Stage

This essay argues that Shakespeare's Julius Caesar puts on stage the different media through which narration and in particular historical narration can be articulated, it shows how historical discourse comes to be built, with more or less success, by older and newer media and how these media enter in competition among themselves to win the audience’s trust. The argument is made through a close analysis of the rhetorical contest between Brutus and Antony (III.2), where we witness a conflict between two different means of communication, namely classic Ars Oratoria (in the person of Brutus) and Theatre (in the person of Antony). Both are considered as media here since they are specific technologies of communication with their own established rules

Il saggio rilegge il famoso scontro oratorio fra Marc’Antonio e Bruto (III.ii) nel Julius Caesar di William Shakespeare come un conflitto fra modi e mezzi della comunicazione assai diversi fra loro. Alla luce della teoria della “rimediazione” (Bolter e Grusin) si interpreta il palcoscenico elisabettiano come un ambiente “ipermediato” in cui mezzi di comunicazione diversi (qui l'oratoria classica e il teatro) vengono rappresentati in lotta fra di loro per conquistare il predominio e la fiducia del pubblico esibendo diversi gradi di vicinanza al vero.